Category Archives: Book Reviews

July 8, 2011 · 1:20 pm

Poem of the Week: Letter to Laundry on the Line by Russ Kesler

All day our business carries us past you,
white blaze at the corner of the eye.
Even the hands that pinned you there
have turned for a while to other things.

Still, we should acknowledge
your humility, your readiness
to shape yourselves to our uses.
You remind us of what transpires
while we are elsewhere,
how the shadows of hawks and clouds
conform to the landscape,
how the songbirds’ proofs
fill the silence and fall out of it.

You swing in a sweet wind,
semblance of our bodies,
bright squares sun dried.
In our absence, you try on
the days we have left.

—
For more information on Russ Kesler, please click here: http://www.public-republic.net/authors/russ-kesler/
—
Thanks to Alison McGhee for passing on these wonderful poems!

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June 18, 2011 · 7:14 pm

Poem of the Week: Invisible Work by Alison Luterman

Because no one could ever praise me enough,

because I don’t mean these poems only

but the unseen

unbelievable effort it takes to live

the life that goes on between them,

I think all the time about invisible work.

About the young mother on Welfare

I interviewed years ago,

who said, “It’s hard.

You bring him to the park,

run rings around yourself keeping him safe,

cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,

and there’s no one

to say what a good job you’re doing,

how you were patient and loving

for the thousandth time even though you had a headache.”

And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself

because I am lonely,

when all the while,

as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried

by great winds across the sky,

thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,

the slow, unglamorous work of healing,

the way worms in the garden

tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe

and bees ransack this world into being,

while owls and poets stalk shadows,

our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers

for everything, and the sea

is a mother too,

whispering and whispering to us

long after we have stopped listening.

I stopped and let myself lean

a moment, against the blue

shoulder of the air. The work

of my heart

is the work of the world’s heart.

There is no other art.

 

Thanks to Alison McGhee for her generous curation of these lovely poems.

For more information on Alison Luterman, please click here: http://www.alisonluterman.com/
—
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June 6, 2011 · 5:29 am

Poem of the Week: Fog by Dorianne Laux

The first of us must have looked up at the night agog,
so many stars, so much light falling down, the bugs
back then big as fists, so many rivers and ponds clogged
with fish we skewered them on sticks, made a fire, bred dogs
from wolves to keep us warm, safe, pines wrapped in fog
or morning mist, the sheep braying beside us, groggy,
their bellies filled with wet grass, the feral pigs become hogs
in a pen, cloven hooves slathered in mud. We built jagged
fences to keep what we didn’t want out, what we did, in, logs
were dragged through a field by horses, a house rose, mugs
placed on a shelf, a table set with plates. Then the nagging
began: Who left the feedbag in the rain? Who forgot to plug
the hole with a rag? The children grew, little quagmires
we sank into. We fed them, scrubbed them, raised them, rang
a bell for supper, school, for the one who died, the soggy
earth taking her back, the others running unaware, tagging
each other in the dusk, calling out numbers. But still the vague
unrest in the dark looking up at the moon, the old dog wagging
his flea-laden tail, barking for no reason they could tell, zagging
off like an uncle, drunk on busthead whiskey, back into the trees.

—

Thanks to Alison Mcghee for kindly curating the poems that are posted here.

For more information on Dorianne Laux, please click here: http://www.doriannelaux.com/index.html
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May 20, 2011 · 3:43 am

Poem of the Week: Signing My Name by Alison Townsend

An artist always signs her name,
my mother said when I brought her my picture,
a puddled blur of scarlet tempera
I thought resembled a horse.

She dipped the brush for me
and watched while I stroked my name,
each letter drying, ruddy,
permanent as blood.

Later, she found an old gilt frame
for me at an auction.
We repainted it pink,
encasing the wobble-headed horse
I’d conjured as carefully
as if it were by da Vinci,
whose notebooks on art
she was reading that summer.

Even when I was six, my mother
believed in my powers, her own unsigned
pencil sketches of oaks and sugar maples
flying off the pad and disappearing,
while her French pastels hardened,
brittle as bone in their box.

Which is why, when I sign my name,
I think of my mother, all she couldn’t
say, burning, in primary colors –
the great, red horse I painted
still watching over us
from the smoke-scrimmed cave of the mind,
the way it did those first years
from the sunlit wall in her kitchen.

Thanks to Alison McGhee for lovingly curating these poems each week.

More about Alison Townsend
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May 13, 2011 · 4:48 am

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway: Book Review

The Cellist of Sarajevo follows the lives of three ordinary people during the siege of Sarajevo in the early 90s. The thread that unifies the three narratives is the cellist, a man who comes out to play Albanoni’s adagio in G Minor for twenty-two days straight to honour the lives of twenty-two needlessly slaughtered innocent by-standers. Continue reading →

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May 8, 2011 · 5:15 pm

White Oleander by Janet Fitch: Book Review

Thanks to Savannah Morin for this guest blog post.

White Oleander is the story of just how complicated, awful and unpredictable youth can be. Astrid is a young teenager with a different sort of Mother; a poet. A painstakingly beautiful, brilliant and convoluted woman, Ingrid, teaches Astrid to think for herself, that loneliness is the human condition and the most awful thing in the world is to be ordinary. Like most young girls, Astrid is fascinated with her mother and only wants to please her. Continue reading →

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May 4, 2011 · 2:08 pm

Poem of the Week: The Lake Isle of Innisfree – William Butler Yeats


I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

—
For more information on Yeats, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/117
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Many thanks to Alison for her curation.

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April 20, 2011 · 5:45 am

Poem of the Week: The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

Weekly poems come via Alison McGhee– with a great deal of gratitude for her wonderful curation.

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.

—
For more information about Stanley Kunitz, please click here.

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April 15, 2011 · 2:41 am

Poem of the Week: Color Theory by Eric Leigh

Thank you to Alison McPhee for the selection of weekly poems.
And thanks to Eric Leigh for writing it.

“I envy your yard,” an old woman once said,
leaning over the fence we shared, pointing out
a cardinal and a jay. “They seldom coexist,”

she told me in the quiet voice of the lonely.
“If you have cardinals, you can get robins.
Just nail a half an orange to the side of a tree.”

And though I was young enough to want everything
I did not have, I never sliced that orange,
never nailed it to a tree. They stay with me still,

the things I did not do, the birds I did not call
with that proud color which refuses rhyme.
I’ve held sorrow closer than I had back then,

joy too. I know now how rare it is to see
those colors come to rest side-by-side—
the red breast, the blue.

—
For more information on Eric Leigh, please click here: http://www.amazon.com/Harms-Way-Poems-Eric-Leigh/dp/1557289301

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April 10, 2011 · 2:13 am

What the Dog Saw: Malcolm Gladwell Book Review

New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell’s collection of articles in What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures is like culture candy. His excavation and exploration of Western cultural icons, science, thoughts, products and ideas makes him something of a contemporary cultural anthropologist. A blurb on the back of his book describes him as a writer who “finds the intersection of science and society to explain how we got to where we are.” Continue reading →

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